FBI Director James B. Comey said Tuesday that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state turned up nothing to warrant criminal charges. Although the final decision technically rests with the Justice Department, as a practical matter, that should end this flap.
The pronouncement came as no surprise. There is no way the FBI would bring charges against the presumptive presidential nominee of either party without solid evidence of a serious crime. Nor should it. Who will become president is a political question to be decided by the American people. They do not need a federal agency’s thumb on the scale.
Still, the FBI director hardly gave Hillary an endorsement. He said she and her staff had been “extremely careless” in the handling of sensitive material and dismissed some points she had made in her defense.
Clinton first said she never sent classified material through her private server. Others claimed the State Department had labeled the messages classified retroactively.
Comey said that there was classified information involved, more than 100 emails contained information classified at the time and that some were at the highest level of classification, “top secret” and above. There was also information that Clinton should have known was sensitive without being told.
One has to wonder. The word “classified” evokes images of military secrets or the identities of spies. But the federal government has repeatedly been shown to apply the “classified” label so broadly as to dilute its meaning. Some of the sensitive information on Clinton’s server could have been the details of a lunch date.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., later criticized the FBI’s conclusion, citing “damage done to the rule of law.”
But Comey had addressed that, saying, “Opinions are irrelevant, ... Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way.”
What it found, Comey said, was that, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
May we now move on?
